Tarkblog

When we visited Terre Haute for easter weekend, we went a day early. The wife wanted to schop at the new Maurices, and since she likes to take her time when looking at women’s clothes I ventured over to the nearby new (to me) Walmart to look around.

Pre-easter Walmart was packed. There was a line of people waiting just to get a turn to go down the easter supplies aisle. It was that busy. Every checkout lane was open, and booked solid. I didn’t need to buy anything, but merely walked around to kill time.

I spent a few minutes wondering through the electronics department when I overheard a conversation between a manager and an employee. The manager basically wanted to know why nobody in the electronics department was answering the phone. Apparently someone had called in and nobody was tending to the call.

Now, this gripes my ass for a number of reasons. When I worked retail many many years ago we got TONS of phone calls. Usually it was a question as to whether we carried a certain product or not, or what the price of a ream of paper was, etc. No doubt this person wanted to know if they had any Nintendo Wii’s in stock, or how much a certain video game cost.

But really, don’t you think the whole calling a store to ask a question like that is really stupid? Have you ever gone shopping somewhere and not been helped when you needed it because the employees were on the phone helping someone who was lazier than you by not even coming to the store in the first place?

Or when people go to the Walmart and want to ask questions of the associates about digital camera quality or something simliar. Trust me, they aren’t experts. Get on the internet and do yourself a little research. You’ll save all of us a lot of time and heartache.

I guess my point is: these places shouldn’t cater to phone call customers, at least not as a higher priority than people already in the store. Why do they answer questions at all? Anything beyond a simple yes or no answer, or explaining what the hours of operation are, is enough. If you want to know bad enough, GO TO THE STORE AND LOOK YOURSELF. That’s what the rest of us do.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.